Description

Space and place have become central to analysis of culture and history in the humanities and social sciences. Making Place examines how people engage the material and social worlds of the urban environment via the rhythms of everyday life and how bodily responses are implicated in the making and experiencing of place. The contributors introduce the concept of spatial ethnography, a new methodological approach that incorporates both material and abstract perspectives in the study of people and place, and encourages consideration of the various levels—from the personal to the planetary—at which spatial change occurs. The book’s case studies come from Costa Rica, Colombia, India, Austria, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Author Bio

Arijit Sen is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is editor (with Jennifer Johung) of Landscapes of Mobility: Culture, Politics, and Placemaking.

Lisa Silverman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is author of Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars and editor (with Deborah Holmes) of Interwar Vienna: Culture between Tradition and Modernity.

Reviews

“Rich, diverse, and provocative meditations on place and identity formation . . . it builds on the previous scholarship on bodies, memory and place while also moving our understanding of this theme in a refreshing and engaging direction: toward the embodied, performed, and lived dimension of built environment, in both historical and contemporary perspectives.”
— Abidin Kusno, University of British Columbia

“Positioned in a growing anthropological and geographical literature that approaches social space as the product of movement, action, and experience, [and specifically] concerned with how built environments are realized as social spaces.”
— Stuart Rockefeller, Columbia University